Fran McKay, a French and History student, has used her extracurricular work as a teaching assistant in France to pursue the Nottingham Advantage Award alongside her degree, and blogs about her experiences below. The Nottingham Advantage Award is an award-winning scheme that has been developed to help students to participate in activities that develop the …

In 1994, in a period of only 100 days, over one million people were brutally murdered during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The horror of the genocide was intensified by the fact that the crimes were perpetrated by people the victims knew and trusted – their neighbours, friends, and family members. The end …

Pitching your book proposal to an editor is apparently a bit like appearing on the game show ‘The Bachelor’ (according to Rachel Toor’s article, ‘The Reality of Writing a Good Book Proposal’). ‘The Bachelor’ is a reality TV show where a man has to pick one woman to take out on a date, rejecting the …

Dr Catherine Gilbert (Research Fellow, Department of French and Francophone Studies) The future of China-Africa relations will increasingly be determined by the interactions of people on the ground. Cultural presence plays a vital role in sensitising African peoples to the diversity of Chinese culture and dispelling many of the myths that are currently in circulation, …

The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo is nothing out of the ordinary. Today’s response to the attack on its offices on January 7 is precisely what sets it apart from other newspapers. The front cover, a cartoon of a weeping prophet Muhammad holding a sign reading “Je suis Charlie” that was released in advance, is …

As if the French president, François Hollande, didn’t have enough woes, elections for the senate have dealt him another blow. Three years after Hollande’s socialists won the first ever majority for the left in the upper house, the right wing has taken back an assembly it believes to be its own. And worse still, among …

During the Autumn Semester 2013-14, and fresh from their year abroad as British Council Language Assistants, three CLAS final-year undergraduate students – Olivia Gowie and Matthew York from the Department of German Studies, and Melissa Watson from the Department of French & Francophone Studies – undertook a language-teaching project at Greenfields Primary School, Nottingham, as …

Earlier in December, the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (CLAS) welcomed a group of burgeoning local Year 11/12 language students for a taste of academic life here at the University of Nottingham. During their half-day ‘taster’ visit, the students attended a French-English subtitling mini-lecture and workshop led by Drs Pierre-Alexis Mével and Dalida …